


Discovering Fan Fiction

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-09-06
Updated: 2002-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-05 21:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lister's watching TV one afternoon before the demise of Red Dwarf, and makes a discovery about Rimmer's hobbies that isn't quite so dull as most.</p><p>Dedicated to Poeie -- huggles, smoochles, and woozles -- and the rest of the RDSS and RD fanauthors out there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Discovering Fan Fiction

**Author's Note:**

> Red Dwarf characters belong to Grant Naylor. 'The Reckless Princess and her Sidekick, the Acrobatic Beaver' belongs to me and Poet and was created when we were mucking around with a silly name generator that sadly no longer exists online.

_Mugs Murphy_ had just finished, and Lister idly changed channels. He was sprawled on his bunk with his feet on the pillow so he could see the television (or mirror, or Holly's screen, depending on which function it was serving at the time). Rimmer was lying on the bunk below him, trying a new way of not revising -- he was using a laptop to create his latest study timetable.

'Will you please choose a channel and stick with it, Lister?'

'I'm only havin' a look, man.'

'Well, kindly stop behaving like an indecisive salmon and just decide, all right?'

Lister ignored this baffling bit of wisdom and changed the channel again. _Mugs_ had given way to the five-thirty news. The next channel on was also news. But the third channel he tried had a cheesy-looking sitcom just beginning.

'Aw_right_.'

'Shut up.'

Lister also ignored this edict and used the remote to turn the volume up. On the screen, a voluptuous and scantily clad superhero type was standing with her hands on her hips, looking down at her sidekick, who was clinging to her leg and looking adoringly upward.

'_Beaver, did I say you could stop humping my leg?_'

Masses of canned laughter issued from the telly at this line, which was evidently some kind of catch phrase, given its delivery. The scene faded into the opening theme -- an exciting, perky tune backgrounded shots of the two girls running around and kicking arse on various ugly creatures, with the one girl clinging to the leg of the other nearly all the time, except for when she was acrobatically kicking the smeg through the nasties. The final shot was the main character leaning against the show's title, Beaver still clinging to her leg.

'The Reckless Princess and her Sidekick, the Acrobatic Beaver? What sorta name is that? It doesn't even make a witty acronym!' Lister said.

'Sssh!' Interestingly, Rimmer seemed to be watching the screen now. 'I've seen this before, it's not so bad. Give it a chance.'

On the screen, the Princess was standing in front of a space-age screen receiving instructions. '_Kasbah is under threat from extraterrestrials,_' the mentor-type male (who looked oddly like Giles from _Buffy_) said. '_You must save us, Princess!_'

The Princess turned to Beaver. '_Come on Beaver. You heard the King. We've got to save Kasbah from extraterrestrials!_'

'_Rock the Kasbah!_' replied Beaver, latching onto the Princess's leg. They dashed -- hobbled - from the room, and the title logo came up again as the show went to a break.

'What the smeg is this smeg?' Lister was rapidly losing interest. 'All it is is these two runnin' around and that Beaver one humpin' the Princess's leg! Who the smeg comes up with this smeg?'

'Lister! Shut up!' Rimmer sat up and stole the remote from his bunkmate, hiding it under his pillow. 'Now either settle down and watch it, or go away.'

Despite his complaints, Lister stayed. The show was soon back on. The two girls were travelling through the countryside, when a cheesy-looking spaceship, possibly constructed of tinfoil and a toilet roll tube, landed in front of them. Three aliens got out -- Lister assumed they were aliens, although they looked like people with pipecleaner feelers stuck to their heads -- and babbled in some alienese language.

'_They're making less sense than a bag of lemurs on speed! Can I kick them, Princess?_' Beaver asked.

'_Let's do it!_'

Beaver detached herself from the Princess's leg and flurried into a whirl of flailing limbs, backflipping, cartwheeling, and generally pulping the aliens into submission. The Princess watched her do it, but shock, horror, was attacked from behind by a second shipload of the aliens.

'Oh, for--'

'Lister. Shut. Up.'

Lister wiffled for a bit, but when the pillow impacted with his head, shut up, at least until the next ad break, whereupon he began to whine again.

'This is rubbish!'

'Lister, you have no warnings left. Make so much as another sound and I'm putting you on report.' The clitter of keys as Rimmer used the laptop was merciless, and Lister dangled his head over the side of the bunk to see exactly what his erstwhile superior was doing that made such an industrious noise.

'Hey, that's not your timetable. What the smeg? What're you writin'?' Rimmer had a word processing document up on the screen and hastily minimised it, but not before Lister caught the word 'Beaver' on the screen. 'You're writin' a story about the show? What kinda idea is that?'

'I'm not!' Rimmer protested. 'I'm not doing anything of the sort!'

Lister slithered over the edge of the bunk, placed his hands on the floor, and flipped down to land almost perfectly on his feet. Idly Rimmer wondered if gymnastics had played any part in Lister's past and, if so, what other skills might be lurking under the lardy outside?

'Show meeee.'

Rimmer tried to fend him off one-handed, attempting to shut down the computer with his other hand, but Lister was, for once, too quick for him. He wrested the laptop from Rimmer's grasp, flicked it back open, and plopped it onto the sleeping quarters table.

'_NC-17_? Rimmer... that's the ratin' they give to the kind of movies _I_ watch...'

But Rimmer was ignoring him. He was, in fact, lying with his pillow over his face, whimpering quietly to himself, and trying to formulate a cunning plan that involved getting the laptop back before Lister actually looked at it, which, he realised, was impossible.

'What's slash?'

'What?'

'What's _slash_? Is it, like, those gore movies?'

'No,' Rimmer whispered.

'Huh?'

'No!'

'Have it your way, man.' Lister busied himself with the scroll bar. 'Who _cares_ who these people belong to, anyway?'

'TPTB.'

'What?'

Rimmer refused to explain that, either. He was wishing, very hard, for Lister to have a heart attack.

Lister kept reading, hmmm-ing to himself and clicking away with the mouse. Rimmer caught a few muttered words - Lister had always been the type who was pathologically unable to read a page of words without mouthing most of them to himself - that he recognised from the introduction. There was still time for the God that Rimmer devoutly didn't believe in to strike the little smegger down with a lightning bolt, or whatever it was God did these days.

* * *

_Several minutes later... (exaggerate or understate depending on your interpretation of Lister's reading ability)_

* * *

'Rimmer...'

'WHAT?'

'Why... why did you write this?'

'What "this"? "This" the whole story or "this" the sex bit?'

'"This" the whole story. Why?'

Rimmer removed the pillow from his face -- it did impede conversation, and Lister didn't sound disgusted... yet...

'I write fan fiction because I enjoy it. I like creating AUs for the characters to play in. When I was just starting out I wasn't very good, but then I got a beta, and she was really good and taught me a lot of stuff. I'm not in it for the feedback -- I just like to write.'

'Alright,' Lister said, still sitting at the table. 'Explain a couple of things?'

'What?'

'What's fan fiction, what's an AU, what's a beta, what's feedback got to do with it, and what the smeg is slash?'

There was a long, drawn-out sigh from Rimmer's direction, and Lister thought he wasn't going to get an answer, but then there was a creak from the bunk as Rimmer got up. He leaned over Lister and opened an Internet Explorer window on the screen, flicking briefly to Word and saving the document as '16.htm', before returning to the Explorer window and typing in a URL.

The fan fiction site home page came up and Rimmer clicked on the FAQ link. 'Here. Comes complete with dictionary of fan fiction terms. Once you've finished reading, kindly let me know -- I want to upload this new fic.'

Befuddled by the blur of new terminology, Lister silently started reading the FAQ, while Rimmer retreated to the shower.

* * *

When Rimmer got out of the shower, it was because the water had run cold, and he'd washed his knees more times than was actually useful, and because he was fairly sure that Lister might be finished reading.

Chewing on a dreadlock, Lister was reading the definition of 'slash' again.

'Fanfic pertaining to the relationship between two male or two female characters. See also femmeslash, yaoi, yuri, shounen-ai and shoujo-ai.' He looked at Rimmer. 'This tells me what it _is_, but not why you _write_ it. I can't believe _you_ writing this stuff...'

'Is it a bad thing?'

Lister hesitated, then shook his head. 'I dunno. No. I'm not all that keen on the idea of male-slash-male stuff, but this is okay... and you write well, almost can't tell you've hardly seen a woman naked.' He grinned. Rimmer didn't punch him, but tensed.

'I write slash because I happen to be good at it, thank you. I started off with het, but found that slash was more on my level of skill.'

Lister moved his lips around the word 'het', accessed a recent memory, and nodded.

'So have ya written more of this?'

Rimmer smiled self-consciously. 'Only a couple. I'm not all that great, really... are you done? Can I upload my fic now?'

'Go for it, man.'

Rimmer sat down at the computer and clicked away busily, skipping nimbly through the myriad steps in the uploading process. He picked the TV show, nominated the rating, selected the genre, and then keyed in a brief summary and hit 'Upload'.

Lister watched, amazed. 'As easy as that?'

'As easy as that. Plus the actual writing, which takes a bit longer.'

Lister nodded. 'Right. D'you think I could write one of those things?'

Rimmer tried not to smile, but it burst onto his face like the sun through the clouds. Finally, something they could agree on. 'You could give it a shot I guess.'

* * *

Three days later, Lister had spent most of his free time labouring over his fic. Rimmer left him to it until Lister shyly announced that the first draft was done -- so strange for Lister, who was never shy about _anything_ \-- then read through it, suggesting a couple of changes. Lister had read nearly every bit of Rimmer's fic by now (he still didn't think much of male-slash-male stories, and Rimmer was determined to win him over), and had a better understanding of the characters - Rimmer didn't just write smut, after all. Though Lister's story was like all first-time stories -- not perfect -- it was good enough, and by the evening of the third day, Rimmer deemed it ready to post.

First, they checked on Rimmer's feedback. He'd scored nearly eight reviews -- 'nearly' eight because one was blank -- and only two were flames, which word Lister had learnt meant a spiteful, pointless, slagging off review.

'Not bad,' Rimmer said. 'Now you do it.'

Lister squirmed. 'I'm not sure how you do it, the first time,' he said.

Rimmer smiled again. 'Then I'll have to show you,' he said. 'Click Logout for me, and then we'll create you a new account.'

The accounts creation process went fine right up to the point where Lister had to pick a screen name, and absolutely baulked at the idea of using his own name.

'What if Krissie sees?'

'As if.'

But Lister insisted. Rimmer played with names like ThirdTech and TechBoy and Smeghead, but Lister refused all of these on the ground that they were still traceable back to him.

'Alright, pick something totally irrelevant... use Lauren, nobody'll ever figure that out...'

'You _would_ make me be a woman, _Dervla_...' Lister typed. 'There. Done.'

Rimmer blushed, then grinned again, and leaned over Lister's shoulder to hit 'Submit'.

'_Now_ you're done.'


End file.
